Viewing page 80 of 106

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

He has repudiated the gift that Klee might have given him--that is, a reassurance of the worth of his unique personality. Klee might have told him that style and form are secondary, and that the artist's first need is to communicate, or just merely realize, that which moves him. 

Nobody ever painted like Klee before, and it seems to me unnecessary that anyone ever paint like him again. His styles of painting grew out of the necessities of mood and imaginative content. More than anyone else he reaffirms an old heresy of my own--that form is merely the shape taken by content. Where content is highly subjective and highly personal new forms will emerge. That is the unceasing wonder of really good art. And that (and not a trick of weaving ribbons of color) is what Klee ought to mean to other artists.
 
Another facet of Klee's work--which, incidentally, must have been part of the development of many painters--has to do with certain unexpected areas of paint which appear during the working of almost all pictures. These areas, although they combine the artist's own color and workmanship are still unplanned, and are sometimes almost mysterious to him. When such an area is good the artist is likely to guard it carefully--whatever other changes he may make. If it is a poor, a-tonal spot, he may say to himself, "Now, how the hell did I come to do that?" and quickly obliterate it. 

Not many artists give serious thought to such accidental areas. I think that van Gogh, for instance, did. In his earliest works there is little either of light or movement. But as these qualities appeared he retained and developed them--at first slowly and painfully--to achieve finally the tremendous fire of movement and color which was necessary to his intensely emotional nature--and by which we know him. To Klee, I believe that such unexpected areas--not only the good ones, but also the discomfiting ones--were matters for great exploration. He studied their pattern and their look to find out why they affected him as they did. He was vividly alert to the sense and mood of such forms and shapes, and their meaning never escaped him. Out of such areas he evolved his thousand and one styles, so unlike in texture and yet so unmistakably stamped with his personality. Herein, again I feel that he has much to give to other artists--in that all his styles emerged out of his own work. None reflects to the slightest degree a coveting of the eminence or achievement of other artists. 

Klee lived at a time when Europe was swept by more "Isms" than most of us could catalogue. A highly sophisticated painter, he was aware of them all. Yet his work bears the stamp of none of them. If they affected him, and I daresay they did, to some extent, it was not to deflect the course of his own feelings. Such art currents were, instead, absorbed in Klee's work, enriching it, giving it a turn here and there, but never rendering it spurious. They say that the invading armies have never succeeded in taking China, but have only themselves been absorbed. I think that the invading art ideas had about that effect upon Klee. 

Another preachment that we can make about Klee is his want of pretentiousness. Any survivor of art jurying will tell you that his most desperate moments have been those when he was confronted by one of the outsized oeuvres which dwarf everything else in the room and the emptiness of which is heightened by sheer acreage. I obviously have no quarrel with large paintings, if they have some purpose other than to impress, but imitation is doubly disconcerting the larger the picture becomes, its emptiness increasing with the square of the area. The thing that we aspiring artists ought to note about Klee is that, with all his admitted stature as an artist, his pictures are small, intimate and unpretentious. I believe he once said that he never painted pictures that couldn't be done within the radius of an elbow! Yet there is so much of amazement, surprise and wonder in these small works of his! 

Now let's invoke Klee in opposition to the

7

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-08-25 00:33:44